Nobel Peace laureate Williams errs in condemning Israel

Shmuley Boteach, Guest columnist

Jody Williams, who received the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to ban land mines, is a hero of mine. In my 2008 book, "The Broken American Male," I wrote: "On the day Jody won, she criticized the American government, President Clinton and every other world leader who didn't sign the petition banning land mines. Had she not condemned them for failing to take the threat of land mines seriously, she would have been treated like royalty.... But that meant nothing to her because she lives for a cause."

She and I later met in Puebla, Mexico, at the City of Ideas Convention, where we became friendly, and were then reunited at the Peace Summit in Newark, N.J.

There I was saddened and stunned to see her signature on the boycott, divestment and sanctions call for a military boycott against Israel, while it is fighting for its life against Hamas. If Israel did not have an army or armaments by which to fight genocidal enemies like Hamas, there would immediately be a second holocaust.

Hamas has a genocidal charter against the Jewish people, which reads: "The Day of Judgment will not come until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, O Muslims ... there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him."

Williams is a universal fighter for women's rights. How could she align herself with Hamas, which is guilty of innumerable honor killings of Palestinian women? How can she, a universal campaigner for the rights of all people, align herself with Hamas, which has killed hundreds of innocent homosexual Palestinians on false charges of collaborating with Israel?

Hamas, in its efforts to impose Sharia law on Gaza, has now criminalized couples holding hands on the beach. Yet Williams and other Nobel Peace laureates claim that Israeli arms are designed to "maintain decades of oppression" rather than simply protect its civilian population from thousands of Hamas rockets with its stated intention of exterminating Israel and its inhabitants.

Amid their fraudulent piety, Hamas values are a disgrace to the peace-loving principles of Islam. Hamas is motivated not by Palestinian freedom but by hatred of Jews. Although Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005, completely dismantling its settlements and forcibly removing its citizens, Hamas never stopped its campaign to annihilate the state of Israel.

When Hamas came to power in 2006, it channeled the billions it received as the world's largest per-capita recipient of international foreign aid into rockets rather than hospitals, bombs rather than universities. And it intentionally launches its rockets from nurseries and schools, rendering the innocent Palestinian population into human shields.

I recognize and mourn the loss of innocent Palestinian life amid Israel's attempts to destroy the Hamas terrorist infrastructure. Even the most advanced military instruments that Israel employs in order to reduce as much as humanly possible any and all civilian collateral casualties are still ultimately imprecise. This becomes especially true as Hamas purposely fires its rockets from hospitals, schools and family homes. Every Arab life is the equal of every Jewish life, and Israel goes to lengths unmatched in modern warfare to avoid innocent deaths.

In her petition, Williams co-signs with Roger Waters, the former Pink Floyd front man. Waters is not anti-Israel but is an anti-Semite.

The essence of anti-Semitism and the age-old blood libel is the attempt to defame the Jewish people as a murderous, bloodthirsty nation that must be neutralized at any cost.

Waters is at the forefront of comparing Israel to Hitler and the Nazis, who murdered 6 million Jews, including 1.5 million Jewish children. Only a despicable man would compare the victims of genocide to their perpetrators. The Jews of Germany did nothing to invite the aggression against them. They did not blow up buses for political purposes. They did not send terrorists into schools to murder children. They lived lives of humanity and decency and were murdered for no other reason than the fact that they were Jews.

Israel's biggest critics are the Jews themselves, because we expect Israel to uphold the highest moral standards. But criticism is one thing, defamation quite another.